


Prologue

by mortalitasi



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 15:17:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2196699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uldred's rule over the Circle Tower, however short-lived, left scars that have not yet healed. Perhaps they never will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prologue

He loses feeling in his fingers first. 

After all distractions are spent and prayers are said and Chants are recited, he begins to press the crook of his elbow to the wall behind him, hoping to inspire something— anything— besides this terrible, dead stillness.

The last thing to move in this room was the head of the acolyte one of the monsters had impaled on a small sharpened spike. The mouth had opened when the stake bit at the head’s chin and then crunched through the jaw.  He’d watched that boy live class by class, friend by friend, day by day. The apprentice with the mousy brown hair doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that silent, garish thing on the spike.

The pity and anger come in turns. Poor apprentice, poor mages, poor me, Maker save us, and then that melts away and the rage tumbles in on awkward, barreling legs, burning everything away. Wretched apprentice. Vile mages. Fool. Fool, fool, fool! It’s their fault but all his, too. What good is a blind peacemaker? What good is a champion with no sword-arm? He’d been unwilling before, but now he can see: he’d never been in control, no more than the common man is in control of the rising sun.  

Too numb. He lets his arms slide back into his lap, listening to the voice of the armor shriek against the stone. He won’t take it off. He can’t. It’s all that’s left. Here there is no prayer book, no darkness— the torches are burning, always burning, an unholy, impure flame, devoid of mercy or cleanliness— there is nothing but the  rock and the blood and the carnage, all quiet and rotting around him like a great flower of filth and ash. 

How long has it been? Does he want to know? He doesn’t know what he wants anymore. Revenge. Relief. Salvation. Destruction. Liberation.

Aren’t they all the same thing, in the end? Meaningless, transitory things. The mistress  has shown him things he would have never even thought of— castles that can be raised through will alone, places that change with emotions, whirling abysses of glass and obsidian and shrieking souls, pits of white fire and hills of purple. He thought he’d known the Fade, but now the truth is clear. It is unknowable, a land of nightmares, a place that bends the very essence of man out of shape and time.

There is only ever one constant in the shifting landscapes of his dreams, and it is her.

His breathing skews, skittering across the top of his breastplate. The stinging, aching heat returns to his eyes, and he shuts them against it. He will not show them the tears. The creature loves it when he cries, he’d learned as much very swiftly and early on.  _A fast one_ , it had said in the first of its interrogations, swirling a pointed nail around the apple of his cheek.  _We’re going to have fun playing together, ser knight_. 

Cullen fists the cold knuckles of his gauntlet against the feverish heat of his temple, the plea for absolution circling in his mind. It’s all he has now: the thoughts, the burning wishes, the anger, the defiance.

He will not break.

+

Some nights he wakes expecting to find himself inside that bubble of violet, the blood crusting on his brow and his hands slick with sweat inside the gauntlets. That feeling never goes away, and he knows it never will either, knows it with the certainty reserved for things like knowing you will take your next breath or that some things cannot heal. 

He still has the dreams, and they don’t change any more than the burning in his heart does— it’s always the same: he’s standing in the green fields of his childhood with the headiness of Fereldan spring all around him, and she is there too, golden and lovely in the sunlight, her hair unbound and loose around her shoulders. She never let it down in the Circle.

She favored her braids, ever careful and quiet. She moved through the library with little more presence than a wisp, so small and bright in comparison to the aged oak of the shelves and the imposing rows of bound, weathered books. It had been her favorite haunt before they’d come to take her away to Ostagar.

In the dreams she’s smiling without her usual guarded caution, and she laughs into his hands when he reaches out to take her face between them. Her curls are soft against his palms, he always thinks when that happens, and something very tiny and true stirs in him to say that this is the way it should be. Peace and plenty and the wind in the grass. No more sorrow. No more loss. No more blood. 

But the dark sweeps away the sun then, and the grass turns brittle and bony, rattling in the gale coming in from the north. She becomes sad and drawn and crumbles to dust between his fingers, the threads of her colors— green, and blue, and wheat-white— drift apart and dissolve as he watches, and a voice he recognizes says,  _Let her go_.

It’s all he knows how to do. Let go. 

Why would she be any different?

+

The weeks after the rebellion are the most difficult. The Gallows are sleepless, ruined, more forbidding than ever before, and here he stands atop the rubble as though something has been accomplished. All the recruits are silent, moving in and out of what remains of the place like ghosts, only asking him questions if there’s to be news from the Divine or when new rumors about the Champion make their circuit around the city.

There’s been uprisings all around, they say, from Ferelden to Cumberland, Circles rioting and orders falling and factions parting. Just days after the battle that had left the city in this sorry state, the Order in Ferelden had declared secession from the Chantry and many others followed in their wake. It worries him.

The world is changing. 

He sighs and rubs at the tender spot between his eyes, hoping it will somehow miraculously alleviate the headache that’s been pounding there for the last quarter of an hour. The lyrium stores have been running dangerously low the past fortnight, just enough to keep the senior members of the Order functional— not that there are many of those left, after the Champion’s confrontation with Meredith.

He tries not to think about that. What’s done is done, and the dead do not rise. He remembers the way pieces and chunks of steaming red crystal would come away and roll at his feet the day they removed what remained of the Knight-Commander from the courtyard. 

It had been no easy task. Anyone close to the blasted thing had started falling ill, or raving about lullabies and scarlet in the night. Dark things. One of the novices had been had been so bold as to handle one of the fragments. He had no sooner hefted up a shard of the crystal than he had to close his hands over his nose and panic as crimson dripped through his fingers— he’d been bleeding from the eyes and screaming that he could not see when he was finally taken to the infirmary and placed in charge of a confused healer.

Cullen tries not to think about that either. What rests now in the Gallows underkeep miles and miles beneath them had once been human. Insane? Perhaps. But still human. 

If he shuts his eyes he can still see the lyrium crawling up her face in spidery sinews, over the line of her mouth crooked in shock, hear the clack of her bracer against her cheek and the strangled gasp when she realized the skin was turning hard and glossy. No one deserves a death like that.

"Knight-Captain."

He turns to find Ser Royce standing behind him with helm underarm. Ser Royce has one of those faces you don’t care to remember until you’ve seen it a few hundred times, and it’s only been recently that Cullen remembers Royce ever existed at all. He has vague memories of seeing the man breaking fast with the rest of them on mornings when the Champion still lived in the city, and of Royce bowing his head on the days he would lead the brothers in Chant. Royce’s beady eyes blink at him as he tries to find his voice. 

"Yes?" he finally says.

"Courier for you," the knight replies, and then a conspiratorial bump appears in his brow. "Carrying the seal of the Wardens, ser. Said she’d talk to no one but you."

Cullen feels he attempts and fails to keep his surprise at mention of the Wardens at bay. They’d been in the city in the recent years, always a peripheral presence— their former Commander had passed by as well, and he’d been of the understanding that she’d hung around the Champion’s company for a time before going wherever it is Wardens go.

He remembers her only slightly from that time in the Circle, the last few tortured days of Uldred’s tyranny. They’ve been of no concern to him after he left. Not since Ostagar. 

"Send her to my quarters," Cullen hears himself saying, and watches as Royce bows curtly and walks from him with a spring in his step. 

He’s standing by the window he knows Knight-Commander Meredith had favored in life when another knight lets the courier in and shuts the door behind them at Cullen’s command. The messenger is small, so small that he’d be hard-pressed to tell you what the last time he’d met someone as short that wasn’t a dwarf; the courier’s tattered cloak rasps over the stone floor as they move forward to place a missive on the desk.

The envelope falls with a thick, heavy-bodied thunk,  facing upward with what he recognizes as the seal of Weisshaupt gleaming wetly in the center. It might as well have just been stamped. 

"You must have travelled a long way," he says, lifting his eyes from the envelope to the courier, squinting when he finds he can’t see their face well under the shadow of their cowl. "I’m sorry to say the Order does not have much to offer by ways of hospitality. These past few weeks have been… trying."

They remain silent, shifting from one scuffed leather boot to another.

"What do the Wardens want so far from their stronghold, with no Blight reigning, and from the templars, no less?" 

The courier sighs at that question and then their hands move to the cowl. “I’m afraid I can’t say,” they remark quietly, and something familiar niggles at the back of Cullen’s mind at the sound. “You’ll have to read the declaration for that. You know how they are with their secrets.” 

Whatever words he’d planned on offering dry up and dissolve into nothingness as the cowl falls around the courier’s shoulders. He can barely summon adequate breath to fill his lungs while she smiles tiredly and brushes the hair from her eyes and tucks some behind one pointed ear. He’s seen her face in the Fade, night after night, but none of the specters from the Veil had this clarity or presence—  none of them felt this real. The missive drops from his grasp and his head swims as she takes a step forward. 

"Is this… is this some sort of trick?" he says, and is surprised by the amount of control in his voice. The ghost of Penny Surana smiles again, this time sad, and brushes aside her cloak. 

"No," she tells him, blinking against the sudden shine of tears. "No, it’s not. Hello, Cullen."


End file.
